Amjad Massad believes the modern workplace is broken and believes AI can fix it.
Replit’s founder and CEO said that traditional corporate work is so marginalized that employees are siled into narrow roles and ideas die in the backlog.
“One of the things that I found very depressing is how fragmented and isolated people are,” Massad recently said on the “Possible” podcast with Reid Hoffman. “Humans are like cogs in a machine, and I don’t think that’s good for the human spirit.”
He says AI is starting to reverse this dynamic by allowing people within large companies to build, test and ship ideas themselves without waiting for engineering approval.
Massad’s bet is that AI agents will automate many of the repetitive, standardized tasks that make up much of corporate life, such as document creation, internal tools, and workflows, allowing employees to think and act more like entrepreneurs.
“We have to become more entrepreneurial and more creative because the boring things, the automated things, are actually handled by machines,” he said.
Massad is not the only technology leader who sees great potential in deploying AI agents.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI agents can already handle tasks typically performed by lower-level employees, Microsoft’s AI platform product lead Asha Sharma said they have the potential to flatten corporate hierarchies, and McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels said his company has already deployed 25,000 AI agents alongside human employees.
On the Possible podcast, Massad pointed to a case in which an employee at a major real estate marketplace had an idea for improving the way buyers were directed to agents, but didn’t have access to engineering resources.
Massad previously said “that idea is dead,” but now he has built a working routing algorithm himself using Replit, an AI-powered coding platform that allows users to build and deploy software without traditional engineering support.
“He built new routing algorithms that generated tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars for the business,” Massad said.
The consequences weren’t just for business. That employee has been promoted repeatedly and is now helping guide the company’s AI strategy at the board level, he said.
Massad sees this as a form of entrepreneurship in large companies, where engineers as well as subject matter experts can turn insights into action.
This shift, he said, will restore the meaning of work by reconnecting people with the results they produce.
“Humans are fundamentally creative,” he added.
Massad believes that if AI succeeds in removing the drudgery, rather than replacing judgment, corporate work could become far less soul-grinding and far more human.
